The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 12

When the horse started, the dogs returned to the flock, too wise to waste energy in a vain pursuit. At a word from Mackenzie they began collecting the shuddering sheep. Dad Frazer came bobbing down the hill with the lantern, breathing loud in his excitement.

"Lord!" said he, when he saw the havoc his light revealed; "a regular old murderin' stock-killer. And I didn't think there was any grizzly in forty miles."

Mackenzie took the lantern, sweeping its light over the mangled bodies of several sheep, torn limb from limb, scattered about as if they had been the center of an explosion.

"A murderin' old stock-killer!" said Dad, panting, out of breath.

Mackenzie held up the light, looking the old man in the face.

"A grizzly don't hop a horse and lope off, and I never met one yet that wore boots," said he. He swung the light near the ground again, pointing to the trampled footprints among the mangled carca.s.ses.

"It was a man!" said Dad, in terrified amazement. "Tore 'em apart like they was rabbits!" He looked up, his weathered face white, his eyes staring. "It takes--it takes--Lord! Do you know how much muscle it takes to tear a sheep up that a-way?"

Mackenzie did not reply. He stood, turning a b.l.o.o.d.y heap of wool and torn flesh with his foot, stunned by this unexampled excess of human ferocity.

Dad recovered from his amazement presently, bent and studied the trampled ground.

"I ain't so sure," he said. "Them looks like man's tracks, but a grizzly's got a foot like a n.i.g.g.e.r, and one of them big fellers makes a noise like a lopin' horse when he tears off through the bresh. I tell you, John, no human man that ever lived could take a live sheep and tear it up that a-way!"

"All right, then; it was a bear," Mackenzie said, not disposed to argue the matter, for argument would not change what he knew to be a fact, nor yet convince Dad Frazer against his reason and experience.

But Mackenzie knew that they were the footprints of a man, and that the noise of the creature running away from camp was the noise of a galloping horse.

CHAPTER IX

A TWO-GUN MAN

"You know, John, if a man's goin' to be a sheepman, John, he's got to keep awake day and night. He ain't goin' to set gabbin' and let a grizzly come right up under his nose and kill his sheep. It's the difference between the man that wouldn't do it and the man that would that makes the difference between a master and a man. That's the difference that stands against Dad Frazer. He'd never work up to partnership in a band of sheep if he lived seven hundred years."

So Tim Sullivan, a few days after the raid on John Mackenzie's flock.

He had come over on hearing of it from Dad Frazer, who had gone to take charge of another band. Tim was out of humor over the loss, small as it was out of the thousands he numbered in his flocks. He concealed his feelings as well as he could under a friendly face, but his words were hard, the accusation and rebuke in them sharp.

Mackenzie flared up at the raking-over Tim gave him, and turned his face away to hold down a hot reply. Only after a struggle he composed himself to speak.

"I suppose it was because you saw the same difference in me that you welched on your agreement to put me in a partner on the increase of this flock as soon as Dad taught me how to work the sheep and handle the dogs," he said. "That's an easy way for a man to slide out from under his obligations; it would apply anywhere in life as well as in the sheep business. I tell you now I don't think it was square."

"Now, lad, I don't want you to look at it that way, not at all, not at all, lad." Tim was as gentle as oil in his front now, afraid that he was in the way of losing a good herder whom he had tricked into working at a bargain price. "I don't think you understand the lay of it, if you've got the impression I intended to take you in at the jump-off, John. It's never done; it's never heard of. A man's got to prove himself, like David of old. There's a lot of Goliaths here on the range he's got to meet and show he's able to handle before any man would trust him full shares on the increase of two thousand sheep."

"You didn't talk that way at first," Mackenzie charged, rather sulkily.

"I took to you when I heard how you laid Swan out in that fight you had with him, John. That was a recommendation. But it wasn't enough, for it was nothing but a chance lucky blow you got in on him that give you the decision. If you'd 'a' missed him, where would you 'a' been at?"

"That's got nothing to do with your making a compact and breaking it.

You've got no right to come here beefing around about the loss of a few sheep with a breach of contract on your side of the fence. You've put it up to me now like you should have done in the beginning. All right; I'll prove myself, like David. But remember there was another fellow by the name of Jacob that went in on a livestock deal with a slippery man, and stick to your agreement this time."

"I don't want you to feel that I'm takin' advantage of you, John; I don't want you to feel that way."

"I don't just feel it; I know it. I'll pay you for the seven sheep the grizzly killed, and take it out of his hide when I catch him."

This offer mollified Tim, melting him down to smiles. He shook hands with Mackenzie, all the heartiness on his side, refusing the offer with voluble protestations that he neither expected nor required it.

"You've got the makin' of a sheepman in you, John; I always thought you had. But----"

"You want to be shown. All right; I'm game, even at forty dollars and found."

Tim beamed at this declaration, but the fires of his satisfaction he was crafty enough to hide from even Mackenzie's penetrating eyes.

Perhaps the glow was due to a thought that this schoolmaster, who owed his notoriety in the sheeplands to a lucky blow, would fail, leaving him far ahead on the deal. He tightened his girths and set his foot in the stirrup, ready to mount and ride home; paused so, hand on the saddle-horn, with a queer, half-puzzled, half-suspicious look in his sheep-wise eyes.

"Wasn't there something else that feller Jacob was workin' for besides the interest in the stock?" he asked.

"Seems to me like there was," Mackenzie returned, carelessly. "The main thing I remember in the transaction was the stone he set up between the old man and himself on the range. 'The Lord watch between thee and me,' you know, it had on it. That's a mighty good motto yet for a sheepherder to front around where his boss can read it. A man's got to have somebody to keep an eye on a sheepman when his back's turned, even today."

Tim laughed, swung into the saddle, where he sat roving his eyes over the range, and back to the little band of sheep that seemed only a handful of dust in the unbounded pastures where they fed. The hillsides were green in that favored section, greener than anywhere Mackenzie had been in the sheeplands, the gra.s.s already long for the lack of mouths to feed. Tim's face glowed at the sight.

"This is the best grazin' this range has ever produced in my day," he said, "too much of it here for that little band you're runnin'. I'll send Dad over with three thousand more this week. You can camp together--it'll save me a wagon, and he'll be company. How's Joan gettin on with the learnin'?"

"She's eating it up."

"I was afraid it'd be that way," said Tim, gloomily; "you can't discourage that girl."

"She's too sincere and capable to be discouraged. I laid down my hand long ago."

"And it's a pity to ruin a good sheepwoman with learnin'," Tim said, shaking his head with the sadness of it.

Tim rode away, leaving Mackenzie to his reflections as he watched his boss' broad back grow smaller from hill to hill. The sheepherder smiled as he recalled Tim's puzzled inquiry on the other consideration of Jacob's contract with the slippery Laban.

_What is this thou hast done unto me? Did not I serve with thee for Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?_

"Tim would do it, too," Mackenzie said, nodding his grave head; "he'd work off the wrong girl on a man as sure as he had two."

It was queer, the way Tim had thought, at the last minute, of the "something else" Jacob had worked for; queer, the way he had turned, his foot up in the stirrup, that puzzled, suspicious expression in his mild, shrewd face. Even if he should remember on the way home, or get out his Bible on his arrival and look the story up, there would be nothing of a parallel between the case of Jacob and that of John Mackenzie to worry his sheepman's head. For though Jacob served his seven years for Rachel, which "seemed to him but a few days, for the love he had to her," he, John Mackenzie, was not serving Tim Sullivan for Joan.

"Nothing to that!" said he, but smiling, a dream in his eyes, over the thought of what might have been a parallel case with Jacob's, here in the sheeplands of the western world.

Tim was scarcely out of sight when a man came riding over the hills from the opposite direction. Mackenzie sighted him afar off, watching him as each hill lifted him to a plainer view. He was a stranger, and a man unsparing of his horse, pushing it uphill and down with unaltered speed. He rode as if the object of his journey lay a long distance ahead, and his time for reaching it was short.

Mackenzie wondered if the fellow had stolen the horse, having it more than half in mind to challenge his pa.s.sage until he could give an account of his haste, when he saw that the rider had no intention of going by without speech. As he mounted the crest of the hill above the flock, he swung straight for the spot where Mackenzie stood.

The stranger drew up with a short grunt of greeting, turning his gaze over the range as if in search of strayed stock. He was a short, spare man, a frowning cast in his eyes, a face darkly handsome, but unsympathetic as a cougar's. He looked down at Mackenzie presently, as if he had put aside the recognition of his presence as a secondary matter, a cold insolence in his challenging, sneering eyes.

"What are you doing over here east of Horsethief?" he inquired, bending his black brows in a frown, his small mustache twitching in catlike threat of a snarl.

"I'm grazing that little band of sheep you see down yonder," Mackenzie returned, evenly, running his eyes over the fellow's gear.